“The problem is cultural sensitivity,” said Rawlings. “We found out when we peeled it back that it was across the campus. There’s no diversity in the faculty and/or senior administration.”

But UNH President Steven H. Kaplan says the NAACP and the UNH administration have similar goals. They simply disagree over how best to get there, he says.

While the NAACP has had similar issues of concern in the past with other area educational institutions, they’ve always been resolved much quicker — often within six months, Rawlings said. He cited Quinnipiac University as one that, while perhaps not any more diverse, has worked hard to address issues that the NAACP has raised.

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“When we first met with Steve Kaplan and the senior leadership, there was no diversity,” Rawlings said, describing the situation as NAACP representatives and a bunch of white men sitting around a table.

But Rawlings said that at UNH, minority students, if they ever run into trouble, “don’t see anyone who looks like them” in positions of authority, and lower-level minority administrators often feel intimidated. He was dismayed that when UNH revamped its diversity council, it was chaired by a Latina and an Asian American, not an African American.

“It’s untenable that we’ve got a university that doesn’t want to” be culturally diverse, Rawlings said. “We have never had a university president or a university that has not worked with us for the betterment of the students.”

He said he’s ready to break off working with UNH, send out a letter summarizing the NAACP’s experience, and then “we will be there every time they need a permit — for anything.”

Kaplan said diversity is important to UNH. He said he takes diversity issues “very seriously,” but “you can’t change the composition of the faculty or the staff in six months. I disagreed with him on that.

“We’re one of the most diverse schools in the area,” although “that doesn’t mean by any means that I think we are as diverse as we should be,” Kaplan said. “Three of the five academic deans are women. One is a Hispanic woman. Another dean is from Sri Lanka — and that’s all happened since I got here.”

“Our aspiration is to have our diversity match the percentage in the general population, but that does not happen in three years,” Kaplan said.

Rawlings “was pushing me with witnesses in the room to do what he had convinced another institution to do, and that’s hire a vice president in charge of diversity,” Kaplan said. He said UNH already has a vice president for human resources whose responsibilities include diversity.

He pointed out that while he wants to continue communicating with Rawlings and the NAACP on diversity issues, Rawlings is acting in an advisory capacity, “not in a supervisory capacity.”

Kaplan agreed that years ago, all 12 of UNH’s vice presidents and deans were white men.

But now, “five are women and two — or 17 percent — bring color to the table,” he said, The two women he referred to are the co-chairpersons of UNH’s revamped diversity council.

Rawlings “is very fixated on his own goals, and his goals are perhaps similar to mine,” Kaplan said, “but his perhaps are more narrow than mine. His are fixated on race and ethnic issues” whereas Kaplan said his goals include a broader view of diversity, including such things as gender and sexual orientation.

While a previous version of the Cultural Diversity Council was co-chaired by an African-American woman, “there wasn’t, frankly, a lot of activity,” Kaplan said.

The new council, chaired by Associate Vice President and Athletic Director Deborah Chin and Lourdes Alvarez, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and renamed the I.D.E.A. — for Inclusion, Diversity, Equality and Access — Council, “frankly ... is a lot more aggressive,” he said.

When Kaplan took the helm at UNH eight years ago, the university’s faculty was 18 percent female. “Now, I believe we’re at 32 percent,” he said. Diversity has increased on the faculty of the business school and the engineering school, he said.

He said he’s not done working with Rawlings and the NAACP, by any means.

“I’ll be happy to meet with him and hear his thoughts at any time in the future,” Kaplan said. “I think we agree on the goal. I think there’s a fundamental difference on the approach.”

Among other things, Rawlings wanted UNH to hire a consultant to help recruit minority administrators and create a new vice president position with responsibility for diversity issues.

Rawlings, without getting into detail, said he had found Quinnipiac to be considerably more responsive than UNH.

Quinnipiac spokesman John Morgan confirmed that the university had an associate vice president for diversity issues, but said Quinnipiac would have no comment on how that position came to be created, past conversations with the NAACP or what came out of them.

Chin, a Chinese-American woman who has worked at UNH for 38 years, said that she has met with Rawlings, agrees with him on the importance of diversity — although maybe not on its precise manifestation — but thinks he could be clearer about what he’s looking for.

When Rawlings told her about the lack of progress he observed during the past three years, “I asked him, ‘What exactly are you talking about?’” she said. “I didn’t get an answer.”

To her, diversity means “our students need to see faculty and staff members who look like them,” and right now, “we’re a 21 percent non-white faculty.”

To get where UNH needs to go, UNH officials, for one thing, “need to make sure that when we do a search, that the search committees” are themselves diverse in composition, she said.

“Hey, we’ve got some work to do,” Chin said. “So does everybody in the whole world — because the world is changing.”

In recent improvements, UNH revamped its policies and procedures, brought in a consultant to do diversity training and is getting ready to do a diversity audit, because if it’s going to measure progress, “we need benchmarking,” Chin said.

That’s of crucial importance because in the future, “the majority population is not going to be white,” she said. “The bottom line is, it’s going to be Hispanic.”

By the numbers, UNH scores in the middle of the pack in terms of diversity within its 6,351-member student body. It is 49 percent white, about 8 percent black, 3 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian, 12 percent non-resident alien and 2 percent “two or more races.”

That compares to 78.5 percent white, 16.7 percent “of color” — a figure that includes black, Asian and Hispanic — 2 percent international and 2.8 percent who do not identify their races or ethnicity among Quinnipiac’s 6,397 undergraduates. Quinnipiac’s graduate students were 72.3 percent white, 15.3 percent “of color” and 3.6 percent international, with 8.8 percent not identifying their race or ethnicity.

Yale University, with a total enrollment of 12,109, was 48.5 percent white, 37.1 percent minorities and 18.4 percent international. Those totals included 5,868 white students, 1,563 Asian students, 887 Hispanic students, 549 black students, 527 students who identified as two or more races, 42 native American or Alaskan native students, 7 native Hawaiian or other Pacific islander students and 348 whose race or ethnicity was unknown.

At Gateway Community College, the faculty of 102 people is 39 percent white, 6 percent black, 3 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Asian, although the race or ethnicity was unknown for 44 percent of the faculty.

Southern had 438 full-time faculty members, of which 79.3 percent were white, 8.1 percent Asian, 6 percent black, 3 percent Hispanic, 1 percent that identify as two or more races and less than 1 percent whose race was unknown.